Ask HN: As a first-time solopreneur how would you go about hiring the first team

Ask people who have hiring experience in your network to help you by sitting in on face to face interviews. Same goes for a mentor if you have one. Try to prioritize hires who'll make that work easier.

Seconded. Get out of your office or house and become part of a larger community. Ideally, you will meet the right folks, or meet folks who know the right folks. Networking can really help. People naturally want to help others (for the most part).

Also, completely agree that you need to be prepared to pay folks, unless you are very close with them and they explicitly understand that you haven't raised, and are at an early stage. If you can't pay them, ask for simple advice and ask if you can call on them for help if/when you do raise/have money.

OP - if you don't know what you are looking for, ideally, be comfortable asking what you would think as stupid (or basic) questions. Don't worry, serious and/or good people worth working with or for won't mock you for that. Just because something is second nature to me (a product/sales/marketing person) doesn't mean it's second nature to someone who has a background in finance or systems engineering or whatever. And that's completely OK!!! People love to talk about themselves or their job or their industry, so just learn to ask good questions, no matter how complex or basic.

I myself have been in that situation recently - one of my neighbors has found tremendous success in the area of business I am currently in - so I've been able to pick his brain more than once, and because he knows I'm serious and want his help, he's more than willing to answer any question I have. Find people like this, and yes, be prepared to pay them or offer them equity if/when appropriate.

This exactly.

The smaller the business, the higher the risk of hiring the wrong people. You have less money to waste and individuals have a much higher impact in small orgs.

Minimize the risk by "flirting" before commiting to hiring.

You have a point with "would be to never hire someone to do work you've not done yourself", but I can't agree with your specific suggestion on how to handle that - instead, my recommendation would be to rely on someone you trust who has done that thing, and use their help to judge expertise and validity of candidates.

It may well be that you're not qualified to hire marketers or developers, but while there's nothing wrong with getting qualified for things, that probably isn't your priority right now, so you should spend that month on doing things that matter and "simply" get someone already qualified to do that task.

And while there are many reasons why you couldn't or wouldn't hire a friend for that role, using your personal contacts to fill gaps in expertise will be very, very important; because you can't simply buy a combination of expertise and trust anywhere.

Figure out your criteria for failure, and what to do in response to it, in advance.

Some of the people you hire are going to be bad. Maybe they'll just be generically middling, maybe they'll be outright incompetent, maybe they'll misallocate resources and cost you thousands, maybe they'll outright steal from you. Maybe they'll just turn out to be a bad person.

Even if you don't know how to do sales, what benefit do you expect to gain from hiring someone to do it? How long will you wait to see those benefits? What will you do if those expectations aren't met? If you have to fire someone, under what conditions will you provide what sort of severance?

The most important part of any contract is how to break it.